Details of the next scheduled webinar can also be found on our facebook events page. Webinars normally take place via Zoom video conferencing platform. We welcome all suggestions for future discussions and events.
Please email ilyenkov2020@gmail.com to request a link.
Upcoming
Wednesday 11 February 18:00 UTC (London time)
Ilyenkov and Bosenko in my life
Presentation by Vladimir Vozniak
Background reading: Ilyenkov’s legacy in Ukraine – Serhii Alushkin and Vasyl Pikhorovich contributed this revelatory account of Ilyenkov’s philosophical legacy in Ukraine to the September 2024 issue of Studies in Eastern European Thought, commemorating Ilyenkov’s centenary.
Previous
See our Webinar videos page for audio, video and discussion notes
Tuesday 9 December
Isabel Jacobs presented
On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality
The suggested reading for this session is a paper (On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality by Isabel Jacobs) that is forthcoming in Who Thinks Concretely? Essays on Evald Ilyenkov? (edited by Isabel Jacobs, Martin Küpper and Trevor Wilson). It reads Evald Ilyenkov’s theory of personality as a materialist reworking of Aristotle’s De Anima. In Ilyenkov’s philosophy of the thinking body, forms arise not inside the head but through social activity, labour, and embodied mediation. The self only comes to itself through encountering (and touching) the other. In this sense, the hand is the central organ of the soul, as a living, plastic, and relational tool of touch. The text also places Ilyenkov into dialogue with the Aristotelian Left, sketching out the possibility of an alternative genealogy of materialist philosophy.
Isabel Jacobs is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, working on Soviet and continental philosophy.
Thursday 16 October
Siyaves Azeri and Martin Küpper
Reclaiming the reflection theory of truth
Our presentation shows how “reflection” can be seen as objective activity, discussing different approaches from 20th-century Marxist thought (e.g. E. Ilyenkov and H. H. Holz) that tried to interpret “reflection” in a productive manner.
Wednesday 24 September
Martin Albert Persch introduced:
The Universal Animal: Dialectics of the first and second nature
Tuesday 8 July
Designing Ilyenkovian AI systems introduced by Kyrill Potapov
Thursday 12 June
An Enactive Account of Labour with Andrea Gambarotto
Thursday 22 May
The AI Fetish with Alex Levant and Alan Díaz
- Review by Alex Levant of The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli
- The Fetish of Intelligent Machines by Alan Díaz Alva
Thursday 17 April at 17:00 London time (UTC+1)
Andrey Maidansky will take questions on his essay Ilyenkov and Freedom of the Will
He will also introduce the materials in Man and History, Volume 9 of Ilyenkov’s collected works, which he has been editing and curating with Ilyenkov’s daughter Ilesh.
Volume 9 will contain the full manuscript of Materialism Militant, i.e. Dialectical (aka Leninist Dialectics).
Andrey works in the Department of the history of Russian philosophy, Institute of philosophy RAS (Moscow, Russia) and is Professor at Belgorod State National Research University.
2022
Online book launch
Launch of the Spanish edition of Finding Evald Ilyenkov at
11am Peru time / 5pm London time, Sunday April 3.
Peruvian publisher Editorial Andé is hosting a discussion with author Corinna Lotz; Cuban philosopher Rogney Piedra Arencibia; translator Miguel Mora Montero (International Friends of Ilyenkov); Martin Cuesta (Dos Cuadros publishers). Moderator: Manuel Cancho (San Luis Gonzaga National University). In Spanish and English. Join live on Editorial Andé Facebook
13 January: A special workshop with Andrey Maidansky, who has been working in the Ilyenkov archive. He has been publishing Ilyenkov’s collected works in the original Russian, and hopes to complete Vol. 6 this January.
The authorities and editors in Ilyenkov’s time imposed many changes to his original manuscripts. Andrey’s findings are crucial for all those who want to know how and why his works suffered so many alterations, not to mention delayed publication.
2021
30 June: An exclusive preview of The Dividual, which pulls together contemporary and archival works, from video animation to installation pieces to the unpublished sketches of Marx and Engels, to contextualize the moment. Curator/author Joshua Simon will introduce the exhibition, which opens at Leuphana University, Luneberg, on 2 July.
Ilyenkov’s dialectical thinking about the relationship between individual and universal has helped inspire this project. Artist Emanuel Almborg, who made the film Talking Hands has also contributed.
Joshua says: “The fall-out from COVID-19 is catalysing a reimagining of social structures and relational norms, questioning and exploring the idea of the individual. The recurring collapse of individual-based structures highlight the instability of the individual-driven world’s systems. Informed by the persistence of other social imaginaries. The Dividual considers the potentialities of relations for living, thinking, and organizing. It suggests other ways of being in the world – beyond the individual.”
Joshua is based in Philadelphia and Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany.
27 May: Andy Brown on the foundation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic in Spinoza’s resolution of the mind-body problem: a realist interpretation. An interpretation of chapters 1 & 2 of Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic, which (1) sets out Cartesian dualism as the fundamental problem of philosophy and (2) offers Spinoza’s doctrine of Substance as the most abstract and simple overcoming of that problem. His talk will draw on contemporary ‘causal powers realism’ as a lens with which to view the argument. He’ll try to contribute to contemporary debates on the foundation of Ilyenkov’s philosophy (for example, the contrasting respective accounts of Ilyenkov in the 2018 symposium in Mind, Culture, and Activity (25:4) reflected in recent discussions in IFI webinars.
Collective reading of Ilyenkov’s essay The Ideal see Webinar notes for videos
2020
19 December: Quiz on Zoom
27 November: Raising a glass to celebrate the bicentenary of Frederick Engels’ birth Webinar and discussion with Rogney Piedra Arencibia
Ilyenkov and Engels’ Dialectics of Nature:
Interaction as the concrete-universal form of development
15 October: Social Activity as Key to Connecting Mind and World:
A realist introduction to the philosophy of E.V. Ilyenkov by Andrew Brown, Professor of Economics and Political Economy at University of Leeds.
10 September: Olga Ivashchuk on The Dialectics of Form and the Vitality of Culture: In memory of Sergei Nikolaivitch Mareev
&
Elena Mareeva thoughts on S. Mareev and Ilyenkov’s Concept of the Ideal.
24 July: Evald Ilyenkov and the development of Marxist thought
presentation by Alexander Surmava
10 July: Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal and Engels’ Dialectics of Nature presentation by Rogney Piedra Arencibia
26 June: Mikhail Epstein, Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature, Emory University Atlanta on Theories in Practice: How the Humanities Can Change the World based on his book The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2012)
12 June: Joint webinar with the Leport Literary Club of Kyiv:
On the question of the role of practice in cognition by E.V. Ilyenkov (new draft translation by the Leport Literature Club, Kyiv)
This article was written by Ilyenkov in 1950-1953 but it was published in 2017 for the first time in a book called E. Ilyenkov. From abstract to concrete. The book contains articles written by Ilyenkov in different years and also a foreword by Elena Illyesh and comments by Andrey Maidansky. The original article title is “К вопросу о роли практики в познании“.
29 May: On the social function of Soviet creative Hegelianism
Introduced by Olga Ivashchuk, Doctor of Philosophy, School of Public Policy, RANEPA, Moscow Presentation & discussion
14 May: The ‘Ideal’ Match: On the Reality of Thinking
Introduced by Siyaves Azeri, associate professor of philosophy, visiting researcher, University of Lorraine, Archives Henri Poincare, Nancy, France
24 April Ilyenkov’s Workshop of Thinking by Maria Karakutsa of the Leport Literature Club in Kyiv: Presentation and Notes
4 March Who failed? Failed who? Žižek’s critique of Ilyenkov
By Kyrill Potapov: notes for March 4 webinar
2019
December 19: Chapter 5 of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete.
October 22: We agreed to share notes on Chapter 4 of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete before this session. Corinna’s notes are here. Kyrill’s critique of Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future is here.
September 25: A discussion on the union of the logical and historical based on Penny’s response to the previous discussion.
June 12: Giannis will present on “Reason and Understanding” and Corinna on “Contradiction”
May 15:Human-Machine Dialectics
In his Black Box story, Ilyenkov de-mythologises the ” machine as the devil”. He names the real beast as “capitalism”. This can be viewed as evidence of the dialectical relationship between the means of the production and the mode of production, that Marx set out in Capital.
2. The importance of “discreteness” and dialectical “othering”, for example in the theory of value. In her article “Why Preserve the Name Human” Keti discusses the relation between the Ideal and concepts of the human.
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Advance reading
E.Ilyenkov: The Mystery of the Black Box (translated by Giuliano Vivaldi)
E.Ilyenkov. “Lenin’s Dialectics and Metaphysics of Positivism” (1980) https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/index.htm
E.Ilyenkov. The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/index.htm
E.Ilyenkov. Dialectics of the Ideal. http://caute.ru/am/files/realideal.pdf
K. Chukhrov. “Why Preserve the Name ‘Human’” http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/why-preserve-the-name-human/
Keti’s talk at the Royal Institute of Philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlouWEthpfo
An abstract of Keti’s lecture can be found here: https://www.wlv.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools-and-institutes/faculty-of-arts/school-of-humanities/undergraduate-courses/philosophy/rip-public-lectures/dr-keti-chukhrov-/
April 16: Keti Chukrov will share her study of Ilyenkov’s Mystery of the Black Box (1968)
Keti is currently a Marie S. Curie Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. An associate professor at the Department of Cultural Theory, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow (2012-2017) and Head of the theory department at National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, she has authored numerous texts on art theory, cultural politics, and philosophy, published in Afterall, Moscow Art Magazine, Artforum, Brumaria, Documenta magazines, e-flux journal, Voprosi Philosophii, Problemi, Stasis, etc. She is currently finishing a book on the interpretation of the notion of “the ideal” in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of 1960s and 1970s.
Here’s a link to a video of Keti Chukhrov presenting a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture: Whether Ideal Can Be Material: On Soviet Marxist Thought
January 22: What has Ilyenkov’s Ideal got to do with Brexit?
2018
November 29: Reading: First two sections of The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 5
October 15: We’ll begin by looking at outstanding points from Chapter 3. After that a discussion on Chapter 4 – Logical Development and Concrete Historicism.
September 11: Continuing the discussion on Chapter 3. Dan will introduce the later sections.
Reading: Chapter 3 of Ilyenkov’s Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital.
Monday 30 July at 15:30 London time GMT +1
Reading: Chapter 3 of Ilyenkov’s Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital.
Also see notes from December 2016 IFI session here.
Monday 9 July at 15:30 London time GMT +1 The Ideal – a home for lost concepts ?
June 11/12 ifi.2018 Deconstructing Neoliberal Hegemony – Symposium: Copenhagen: see full report
Tuesday 29 May at 15.30 London time
Reading: Contradictions within the Ideal, mediation and transformation in global capitalist society
March 13
Further discussion on Lenin’s Dialectics, this essay by Professor Vesa Oittinen, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland
Tuesday, February 13
Lenin’s Dialectics. Discussion on this essay by Professor Vesa Oittinen, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland
Tuesday January 16
We discussed the Dialectics of Hegemony
Tuesday 12 December
We continued the discussion on:
Radical Currents in Soviet Philosophy: Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov
by Arto Artinian based on this article .
2017
ISCAR 2017 : August 28 – September 1
Taking a 360° view of the landscape of
cultural-historical activity research:
The state of our scholarship in practice
5th International Congress
August 28th – September 1st 2017
Quebec, Canada
IFI member Monica Lemos presented a paper:
Networking sites in social movements: communicating and transforming educational realities
International Friends of Ilyenkov 